


Life’s too short, take a chance (Skate that line of rage and romance)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Coda, Feelings Realization, Fluff, Getting Together, Humor, Jealous Danny "Danno" Williams, M/M, Oblivious Danny "Danno" Williams, Verbal Fighting, h50 episode 10.01, he's also a bit of an asshole, minor Steve McGarrett/Brooke (Hawaii Five-0 2010), there's a really strange extended poo metaphor in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-02 18:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20811218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “Oh,” Danny says, stretched long and offended. He’s sitting at one of Kamekona’s picknick tables across from Steve, who’s grey-bearded and fluffy-haired and telling him he’s breaking up with him. “Cut me out? You can’t cut me out.”“I can and I did and I have,” Steve says, and that’s the bit where, looking back, internally Danny maybe went a little… goofy. Let’s go with goofy.Or: Danny realizes that setting Steve up on a date was a colossal mistake. He fixes it, kind of, in a bit of a bad way.





	Life’s too short, take a chance (Skate that line of rage and romance)

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in about two and a half hours, very quickly, and has probably not been read through enough, but I’m going to bed now so I’m posting it anyway. And look! I wrote my first season ten fic! Happy new season, everyone. :D 🎉
> 
> -
> 
> This probably works best if you’ve actually seen 10.01, but the important bits, if you haven’t: Steve goes on a first date with a very nice, very pretty woman named Brooke, and before they can even order, Steve gets a call from Danny, who set him up on this date because he knows Brooke through Charlie’s school somehow (she might be a teacher, actually, but I made her the mother of another student). Danny heckles Steve about his dating skills until Steve hangs up, and then he goes back to the table, apologizes, and says: “That was Danny. Who I love. Very much. Uhm, but he can be a little intense.” Brooke then says something about how that sounds like her ex and Steve says that’s funny because it’s actually a little like he and Danny are married (oh boy), and Steve and Brooke decide to restart their date and apparently have a good time, because Steve later tells Danny they’re having a second date. At the end of the episode, the team throws a “yay, you recovered from getting shot!” party at Kamekona’s and Steve tells Danny that he and Brooke are breaking up with Danny and that Danny can’t call anymore or pester them about the nature of their relationship and that Danny is “now officially on radio silence”.
> 
> **Edit a day later:** In my haste I completely forgot to give credit for the title! It's from the song _Rage and Romance_ by Bressie.

“Oh,” Danny says, stretched long and offended. He’s sitting at one of Kamekona’s picknick tables across from Steve, who’s grey-bearded and fluffy-haired and telling him he’s breaking up with him. “Cut me out? You can’t cut me out.”

“I can and I did and I have,” Steve says, and that’s the bit where, looking back, internally Danny maybe went a little… goofy. Let’s go with goofy.

*

“It was her idea,” Steve had said. “How about that?”

And yeah, actually, how about that, huh? 

Usually on the days when Danny drops Charlie off at school, he walks Charlie to the door of the classroom, hugs him and tells him he loves him, and heads back to the Camaro. This time, he may linger, just a little bit, crouched in front of Charlie and holding on to one of the straps of his backpack. A tiny bit. Unnoticeable, he thinks, until Charlie glances at one of his playmates who’s already in the class at his desk and then tells Danny, with a serious face, “I have to go now, Danno.”

“You have to go? Where do you have to go?” Charlie is about to open his mouth when Danny spots Brooke, in the flesh, turning the corner behind Charlie. “Okay,” Danny relents, “I appreciate that you prioritize your education, buddy. You should go. I’m proud of you.”

Charlie looks a little relieved to be released from his clutches – which Danny will have nightmares about later, thanks Brooke – and submits to one last quick hug before he speeds into the classroom. 

Brooke’s daughter Mia is a cute little thing with long dark pigtails. She’s already peeling away from Brooke, too, following Charlie pretty closely, and that, right there, that’s another reason that Danny obviously made a giant mistake in trying to hook Steve up with Brooke. Steve and Charlie, they’re family. If Steve and Brooke get serious, little Mia will be Steve’s stepdaughter, which would make Charlie and Mia’s beautiful young romance practically incest. As their guardians, they should all work together to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Danny ignores, for convenience’s sake, the fact that Mia and Charlie don’t interact at all and Mia heads straight past Charlie to a different cluster of kids. Details.

He creaks upright out of his crouch and pretends his knees don’t hurt like a bitch from sitting like that for so long. “Hi Brooke,” he says, grinning and cheery. “How are you?”

Brooke smiles politely. She’s got a nice smile – that’s probably what fooled Danny into thinking this was a good idea in the first place. “Hi Danny. I’m alright, thanks.”

She doesn’t ask him how he is. Another sign she’s secretly a witch, or at least doesn’t know what manners are and Steve should not have kids with her because they’d end up in jail somehow because their upbringing would be sorely lacking and that would break Steve’s huge marshmallow heart. Danny won’t stand for that. He just won’t.

He grins a little wider and makes it a touch rueful. “So,” he says, and pauses the exact right one and a half beat. “This is awkward, huh?”

Brooke raises her suspiciously perfectly sculpted eyebrows. No normal, sane person has eyebrows that perfect. “Why is it awkward?”

Danny raises his own eyebrows right back at her and widens his eyes a little for effect. He lets his grin fade out. “Oh God,” he says, and in his defense, that’s the first time he fully realizes what he’s been mindlessly steering towards ever since that dinner at Kamekona’s. It’s simultaneously the last time he could have put a stop to it, but he already knows he’s not going to. He just widens his eyes a little further, painfully uncomfortable surprise so picture perfect he should be doing a clean sweep at the next Oscars. “Steve didn’t tell you yet? Don’t tell me Steve didn’t tell you.”

“Tell me what?” Brooke asks. She’s frowning.

It’s really easy, after that.

*

This Monday is one of Danny’s precious days off – part of the agreement he made with Steve about easing themselves into retirement very, very slowly – so he heads back home after he does the deed. He’s not surprised when his front door slams open fifty-seven minutes later. If anything, he was getting a little worried Steve might have gotten himself into a car crash on the way here, and that’s why it was taking him almost a full hour.

Steve is in intimidation mode. He doesn’t bother closing the door behind him, but barges in, puffed up like a chicken, brandishing his phone like it’s a lethal weapon. There’s no actual weapon at his hip and he’s in shorts and a t-shirt, which implies he obediently kept to his part of the agreement and didn’t sneak into work anyway, like Danny knows he’s done a few times in the past. 

“What did you do?” Steve demands, face redder than it should be. Steve’s stress counselor would have something to say about that.

Danny doesn’t, so he gets up from the couch where he’s mostly been staring at the blank tv screen and evades the question. “What do you mean, what did I do? I didn’t do anything.”

Steve, who’d already encroached on Danny’s personal space, crowds in closer. He uses the hand holding his phone to jab a finger inches from Danny’s nose. “Yes, you did. I know you did, because Brooke just sent me a text telling me she was very disappointed I didn’t have the guts to tell her to her face that I didn’t want a second date and that I was an immature asshole for planning on freezing her out. How would she have gotten any of those impressions, huh, if you didn’t do anything?”

“Why are you so sure this is on me?” Danny throws back, totally offended. He puts some attitude behind it too, because that’s what he would do if he weren’t guilty as sin. 

“I know you had Charlie today,” Steve says. So okay, that one was kind of a softball.

Danny swats Steve’s hand out of his face, which is more difficult than it sounds because it keeps coming back. He steps around Steve and heads for the open door to close it, and when he turns, Steve has apparently followed him step for step, because he’s now very damn nearly boxing Danny in against Danny’s own front door. The gall.

“Hey! A little room to breathe would be good, here.”

Steve keeps glaring at Danny something fierce, but he backs off maybe half a foot. It’s not much, but it’s something. 

“I didn’t do anything,” Danny says, as a reward. Tit for tat. “But I might’ve _said_ something.”

“_Danny_,” Steve says, face like a thundercloud. “This was the first date I went on in way over a year. It was the first _first_ date I went on in I don’t even know how long, but you probably would, because you’ve been pestering me about it all this time. Remember that? Why are you sabotaging me now? Is this fun for you?”

“No!” Now, finally, Danny’s starting to feel some actual outrage, too. “How could you even think that? Is that the kind of person you think I am?”

“I don’t know, Danny. Right now, I really don’t know what kind of person you are.”

That _stings_. It’s a sharp, piercing physical ache, a little to the left of his sternum. “I’m the kind of person who realized he’d made a mistake! The kind that realized Brooke is an evil woman and you shouldn’t be getting close to her, but I also know you, so I know you wouldn’t have listened to me if I told you.”

Steve squares his shoulders and puffs angry air out through his nose like a horse. “Why? Why is she suddenly evil?”

“She’s a bad influence!”

“Why?”

“She made you break up with me!”

There’s kind of a silence after that. Getting there is not hard, with only two people in a room, but this is not just quiet, it’s Silent, capital letter S. It’s a stark contrast with all of the recent shouting.

“Okay, Danny,” Steve says, and then briefly closes his eyes and breathes in and out through his teeth. He finally slips his phone into his shorts pocket, jerkily, before he starts speaking again. “You know what I did after I hung up on you, when you called me during that date?”

Danny’s not sure he has any right to be acting haughty and superior, but there’s nothing stopping him, so he does it anyway. “No, _Steve_, of course I don’t know that. I wasn’t there. How am I supposed to know that?”

“That wasn’t an actual question,” Steve says, voice rising slightly in pitch again, annoyance building.

“Then why ask me, hm?”

That half a foot of space Steve deigned to cede gets conquered again, and a good number of extra inches on top. “Because I went back to the table, I told Brooke I love you very much and I did the thing where I compare our relationship to a marriage!”

“That’s stupid! That’s exactly what I was talking about when I said you had _zero_ game. You don’t say that kind of stuff on a date with someone else, you moron!”

“What, now that’s not good, either? What do you want, Danny? What would meet your high standards of approval?”

Danny is tempted to cross his arms over his chest, but that’s gonna be hard, if he doesn’t want to push himself back against the door even more awkwardly. He considers pushing Steve away, instead, but dismisses that idea as too hard, too. “I want you to not date some floozy who’s going to let your kids build a career in Halawa.”

Steve looks angrily confused for a second, but the anger seems to win that battle, because he doesn’t inquire about the criminal future of his unborn children. “Well, how? Who should I date then, if even someone you personally vetted for me isn’t good enough?”

“I don’t know.” Danny’s getting seriously tired of Steve treating him like he’s supposed to have all the answers. “Someone decent. Someone who loves you.”

Steve is clearly on the verge of a comeback and then goes strangely Silent for a second or two, his jaw jutting out. His eyes look like tiny windows that show his brain doing long division by hand. There’s a moment where they visibly flip from _calculating…_ to some answer Danny can’t interpret because it might be in secret code. 

“You love me,” Steve says, almost like an accusation.

“Obviously,” Danny sneers. He doesn’t see what that has to do with anything.

“Well, maybe you should-” At this point Steve abandons speech in favor of some truly unintelligible waving of his hands. They’re never playing charades.

“What, what? Sweep my floor? Do the floss dance? Assassinate Kim Jong Un?”

“Ask me out!” Steve half yells, and then he abruptly snaps his mouth shut and looks _impressively_ constipated, like it’s been getting stuck in there for a week and any moment now there could be an explosion of shit.

“Why would I do that!” Danny yells, no half about it, and Steve is just starting to look like he’s been hit in the face by some poo when Danny realizes, with a sudden mind-numbing and toe-tingling clarity, _exactly_ why he would do that. “Oh Christ,” he says, and he feels kind of dizzy. That’s what happens when the world starts spinning the other direction with no warning.

Steve’s expression has nothing to do with feces anymore. He looks a little worried, a little hopeful, and a little like there are still traces of residual anger in his mood. “You alright?”

“Fine,” Danny lies. He tries to shake his head and it makes him dizzier. “I, I might have to sit down for a bit.” He’d need to walk to reach a chair, so instead he leans back against the door. It’s the closest thing. He was already mostly pressed against it, anyway.

Steve’s hands come up to his shoulders, holding on tightly, and the door is suddenly not the closest thing anymore.

“Hey,” Danny says, eyes on the place where one of Steve’s tattoos peeks out from the sleeve of his shirt. “No groping until at least the second date.”

“Shut the hell up,” Steve tells him, which, yeah, fair. He says it kind of cheerfully, though. Like he’s suddenly seeing light at the end of a dark tunnel.

Danny looks him in the eye – which is easy, because it’s actually much harder _not_ to look at Steve’s face right then, close as it is – and sees that the corners of Steve’s eyes are doing that fond crinkly thing they do sometimes. It’s gotten more noticeable as well as more frequent as they’ve gotten older. Danny sighs. “I’ve been an asshole.”

“I’m used to it,” Steve says, graciously.

“Oh, nice.” It kind of actually is, though, in a weird way. “Wanna get some coffee later?”

Steve’s grip on Danny’s shoulders loosens, but he doesn’t let go. Danny would like to think it means Steve trusts him to stand on his own two feet again but likes the touch as much as Danny does. “Jesus, Danno. And you say I have no game.”

“You don’t,” Danny says, and Steve grins, and Danny has the sudden thought that he’s never gotten a date by insulting someone. 

Then again, there has to be a first time for everything.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are awesome and welcome, and thank you for reading!! ❤
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


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